by Peter James
It was mid-afternoon. He’d changed Noah’s nappy and Noah was now sleeping in his cot, with a white dummy in his mouth. Cleo was having a snooze in bed. Humphrey lay in his basket, a rubber bone in front of his nose, still sulking away with jealousy about Noah, despite his master having taken him for a five-mile run along Brighton seafront early this morning.
Roy Grace removed a lengthy form from a large envelope. After several months of having his house in Hove on the market, the estate agents had finally found a buyer for it. A woman with a small boy, currently living in Germany. He had not met them, but she seemed serious and a date had been set for the exchange of contracts. The form was a detailed questionnaire about all aspects of the property, from the woman’s conveyancing solicitor.
Cleo’s house, where he was now living, was also on the market. Their plan was to pool the proceeds of the two houses and buy a property in the country, a short distance from Brighton, where Humphrey could have a decent-size garden, and maybe even a field, to roam in.
The only person not happy about the whole situation was his colleague and closest friend, Glenn Branson, who had been lodging at Roy’s house since splitting up with his wife. Poor Glenn would have to find somewhere new to live; but it was time he moved on, got a place of his own and got his life back together.
Just as Roy focused on the first item on the form, the house phone rang.
He snatched the receiver, not wanting the ringing to wake Noah. ‘Hello?’ he answered quietly, hoping desperately this was not to do with work.
The male voice at the other end spoke with a silky purr, and almost instantly, Grace felt relieved – and irritated.
‘Good afternoon. I’m calling because a good friend of yours told me to call you.’
‘Oh really, who was that?’
‘Gerard Scott.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone of that name.’
‘He says to pass on his very best wishes.’
‘I think you must have the wrong number.’
‘We’re saving him two thousand five hundred pounds a year off his heating bill.’
‘Really?’ Grace disliked the intrusion of telesales people, although he could not help having a tiny amount of sympathy for them, trying to make a living. ‘How?’
‘We have a representative working in your area next week. Perhaps I could make an appointment at a time convenient for you?’
‘A representative for what, exactly?’
‘Loft insulation.’
‘Loft insulation?’
‘We are England’s leading specialists. The insulation we put in is so effective it will have fully paid for itself in just nine years from savings on your fuel bills.’
Quite apart from anything else, with their plans to move, Cleo wasn’t about to spend any money on this place that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Mischievously, he said, ‘Are you aware you’re calling a crime scene?’
‘A crime scene?’
‘I need your name, address, date of birth and your connection with the murder victim. Are you willing to come voluntarily to Brighton police station to make a statement?’
There was a sudden silence. It was followed by the click of the line disconnecting.
Yesss! Grace smiled at his small triumph. He looked down at his sleeping son.
Moments later his mobile rang. He answered. It was the new duty Detective Inspector at Brighton’s John Street police station, who had replaced the recently promoted Jason Tingley. Any call from him was unlikely to be good news.
‘Sorry to bother you, sir. We have a nasty tie-up domestic robbery in Withdean Road. A ninety-eight-year-old lady has been tortured. She’s been taken to the ITU at the Royal Sussex County Hospital. Looks like her home may have been stripped of antiques and paintings.’
Stepping away from Noah, to the far end of the room, he asked, ‘Is she going to survive?’
‘Well, she’s slipping in and out of consciousness, sir.’
‘What do you have on it?’ he asked.
‘Nothing so far. This is a very vicious attack. I’ve attended myself and my feelings are this is something for Major Crime to handle. All the indications are that this is a high-value robbery, and I don’t think the victim will make it.’
Thugs who hurt elderly people were high up on Roy Grace’s list of what made him truly angry. ‘Okay,’ he said, masking his reluctance to be involved. ‘Give me the details.’
He scribbled them down on a pad. Then, when he had finished with the DI, he called Detective Sergeant Glenn Branson, whom he had made an acting Detective Inspector on the last case they had been on together, two months back, when a stalker was threatening the life of a popstar-turned-actress who had been making a movie in Brighton.
‘Doing anything important right now, Glenn?’ he asked.
‘Apart from dealing with the divorce papers from my bitch wife?’ he replied.
‘Good. Meet me at 146 Withdean Road in thirty minutes.’
‘Smart address, that street.’
‘So be on your best behaviour!’
14
Yet again he sat in the elderly, borrowed, S-Type Jaguar outside the entrance to the gated development where Roy Grace now lived with his beloved Cleo Morey and their two-month-old baby, Noah. Noah Jack Grace.
The windows of the Jaguar were illegally blackened. No one could see him. No one could see the mask of hatred that was his face.
Noah Jack.
He’d got all the details from the Registry Office at Brighton Town Hall.
Noah Jack Grace.
Leave him alone, friends had said. Move on.
No way. You could not just forget a man who had totally screwed your life. You had to take things one step at a time. And this was the first step. You had to level the score. Last night he’d watched, through night-vision binoculars, as one of the residents had punched the code into the number panel beside the gates. Later he’d entered himself, checked there was no one watching and no CCTV cameras, and stood in the darkness outside the Grace house, as he liked to call it. He’d watched through the slats in the blinds as Detective Superintendent Grace and his slut, Cleo, lay curled up on the sofa in front of the television, with the baby monitor beside them.
Such a cosy scene.
How sweet would it be for Cleo Morey, Senior Anatomical Pathology Technician at Brighton and Hove Mortuary, to attend the recovery of a baby, suffocated by a plastic bag over its head, from a rubbish dump? And then find it was her own?
How symbolic would that be?
Rubbish father, rubbish baby.
He liked that image so much. But he also liked the image of Grace coming home to find his beautiful slut permanently disfigured. Acid in her face might teach her not to fraternize with cops.
Options. He liked having options. You didn’t have much freedom of choice when you were in prison, but free, you had all the options in the world.
Yes.
He crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray.
And now the gates were opening. Someone was walking out. Suited and booted. Detective Superintendent Roy Grace. Looking a bit tired.
He watched him stride, in the afternoon sunshine, up the road towards the black Alfa Romeo Giulietta in the residents’ parking bay a short distance away.
He saw the brake lights come on, then the car drive away into the summer afternoon.
He thought about the pleasure he would get from Detective Superintendent Roy Grace’s suffering.
Oh yes. The joy of revenge. A dish best eaten cold.
A cold baby.
He liked that idea a lot.
The unit that was for rent was number 4. The Grace House was next door. The adjoining property. Just a few formalities to settle and then, in a week or so’s time, he would become their next-door neighbour.
In Roy Grace’s face, for a change, instead of the copper being in his.
How sweet was that going to be?
15
New York, 1922
&
nbsp; An icy breeze blew, and sleet was falling, as the small boy stood, with his sister and his stern aunt, amid the huge crowd of people along the wharf at Pier 54. He was dressed in a long coat, woollen gloves and a tweed cap, and he looked forlorn. The few possessions he owned in the world were crammed into the small leather valise which sat on the ground beside him. He felt dwarfed by the crowd.
He was five years old, feeling lost and bewildered – and angry at his aunt. She was taking him and his sister away from his ma and pa. His ma was in the cemetery and she wasn’t coming home, he understood that much; that she had left for ever. She had gone to another place. She was in Heaven.
But his pa might come home at any time. He wanted to wait, but his aunt wouldn’t let him. His pa wasn’t ever coming back, she told him. His sister believed her, but he refused to. The big guy, with a silver rabbit on a chain around his neck, who hoisted him up on his shoulders, who pitched balls at him, who took him on the rides at Coney Island, and went swimming in the sea, and kissed him with his bristly face, and smelled of beer and tobacco, and told him stories about the Man in the Moon, and sneaked off with him to the zoo when he had promised his mother he was taking him to church – he was coming home.
He was. He knew it.
‘I don’t want to go,’ he said petulantly. ‘I want to go home and wait for Pa. I hate you!’ Then he stamped his foot on the ground.
‘You’re going to like Ireland,’ she said. ‘It’s a better place. Safer. Less troubles there.’
‘Maybe Pa will be there.’
Oonagh Daly said nothing.
‘Maybe? Do you think?’ he asked hopefully.
She still said nothing.
There was a tang of salt in the air, peppered with an acrid stench of burning coke, sweet snatches of cigarette and pipe smoke. All around was the constant grinding of machinery, men shouting, the cry of gulls. A crate swung on creaking ropes, and pulleys clanked and squeaked high above him. The dark hull of the ship rose even higher, like a mountain. The boy looked around him. His pa worked on the waterfront; maybe he was working here today? He watched every face. Every single face.
It felt wrong to be leaving. He needed to find his pa. But now they were about to sail thousands of miles away. Away from his pa. He did not understand why.
He stared up at tall people. At the cranes and the derricks, and the massive hull of the ship, the Mauretania, with its four funnels and gangways. A rope pulled at a capstan near him, and groaned. He caught a glimpse of the dark-green water of the Hudson between the ship and the quay; heard the slop-splash of the water. It was glossy with oil, with bubbles of froth, and litter suspended in it. They would be boarding soon. The ship was going to take them to a place called Dublin, in Ireland. His ma was in Heaven, and his pa had disappeared, taken by the bad men. They’d killed him, too, his aunt said. But he did not believe her.
Now his aunt Oonagh, whom he barely knew and did not like, was taking them to a new life, she said. A place where they would be safer. To a farm in the countryside where there were chickens, cows, pigs and sheep.
He didn’t want chickens or cows or pigs or sheep. He wanted his pa.
He didn’t want to leave. He was crying. Every few minutes his aunt would dab his eyes with a handkerchief. His sister, who was three years older, clutched her ragged little bear, Mr Stuffykins, under her arm and was silent. The three of them waited, watching an endless procession of people making their ascent up the gangway, some elderly, but most of them young and many with babies and small children. They carried suitcases, packing cases, wooden and cardboard boxes, and sometimes dogs and cats in baskets. Occasionally one of them lugged a piece of furniture. One man he watched was staggering under the weight of a wooden grandfather clock.
None of them noticed the youth, with a cap low over his face, elbowing his way through the crowd behind them. Not until the boy heard his name called out.
He turned. ‘Yes?’
The youth thrust a heavy brown-paper bag into the boy’s hand. ‘I was told to give you this,’ he said. ‘For you and your sister. And to tell you, ‘Watch the numbers!’
‘Excuse me!’ his aunt called out.
But he was already moving away, quickly and furtively.
‘Excuse me!’ she called out louder. ‘Young man, who sent you?’
‘A friend!’ he replied. Then within seconds, like a sinking stone, he was swallowed by the crowd and vanished.
‘Aunt Oonagh, who was that boy?’ his sister, engulfed in a duffel coat too big for her and wearing a bobble hat, asked.
‘Let me see that,’ their aunt said, snatching the bag from the boy’s hand, surprised at how heavy it was. She peered inside it, and frowned. It contained a small black revolver, a broken pocket watch and a folded page from a newspaper.
She removed the paper and opened it carefully. It was the front page of an old copy of the Daily News. The headline was the murder of Brendan Daly’s wife, and the abduction and disappearance of Brendan Daly, chief contender for the role of boss of the White Hand Gang. The children’s parents.
There was a photograph of Daly. A big, handsome, angry-looking guy with a shock of shiny black hair, slicked back, wearing a three-piece suit, with a draped pocket watch chain, a rumpled white shirt and a plain tie, beneath a greatcoat.
Scribbled down the margin in blue ink were four names and twelve numbers.
‘What does it say?’ his sister asked.
His aunt showed it to her, then turned it over. The boy looked too. He couldn’t read what the newspaper said, and he struggled with the names, but he could read the twelve numbers.
9 5 3 7 0 4 0 4 2 4 0 4, the boy read out, slowly. ‘What do they mean?’ he asked.
‘You tell me!’ his aunt said, handing it to him. ‘They were given to you. You tell me.’
It was something important, he knew. It had to be. But he had no idea what.
‘Are they the names of the bad men who took Pa?’ his sister said.
His aunt said nothing.
The boy folded the piece of paper and tucked it carefully into his inside pocket. Then he looked at the gun that his aunt had lifted from the bag and was holding nervously, as if scared it was about to sting or bite her. ‘I should get rid of this,’ she said. ‘It’s a bad thing to have a gun.’ She turned, and started weaving through the crowd towards the edge of the quay. But as she was about to throw it into the water, the boy grabbed her arm.
‘No!’ he said. ‘It may be Pa’s! He might want it back! He might come for it, he might!’ He burst into tears.
She looked down at him and her expression softened. ‘All right, we’ll keep it for the voyage. Just in case your pa’s waiting for us at the other end.’
He nodded eagerly, wiping away his tears with the back of his right hand.
His aunt put the gun into her purse, then removed the watch. It was a man’s gold-case pocket watch, on a chain, with a moonphase on the dial. The crystal was cracked and the crown slightly buckled. The moon hands were stopped at five minutes past four. He snatched it from her hand and stared at it. ‘Pa’s watch,’ he said. ‘It’s Pa’s.’
There was a long, loud, single blast of the ship’s horn. That and the five gunshots in the night and the screams of his mother were the sounds by which the boy would, for the rest of his life, remember New York.
Together with the image of the watch.
16
2012
In the hushed warm air of the Intensive Care Unit of the Royal Sussex County Hospital, the old man, tired from his flight back from the South of France, sat beside the unconscious woman, holding her frail, veined and liver-spotted hand. Somewhere near he heard the swish of a curtain being pulled.
‘Aileen, I’m here, can you hear me?’
He felt a faint squeeze back. Her silver hair, normally elegantly coiffed, looked ragged and matted. Her face, beneath the bandages, was puffy, bloated, mottled with black and orange bruises, and there were a mass of what he had been told were cigar
ette burns all around her neck. The patches of her bare flesh that were unmarked were the alabaster colour of a cadaver.
Anger seethed in him. He was thinking about the long journey through life they had both made. To end up like this. He was not a man who often cried, but at this moment, he was crushing tears with his eyelashes.
She had compound and depressed skull fractures, a lesion to the cervical region of her spinal cord, from where someone had stamped on her, which was likely to leave her a paraplegic if she survived, as well as an almost irrelevant – at this stage – fractured right clavicle and fractured pelvis.
Aileen had been in steady decline throughout the day, and although he was still clinging to a desperate, increasingly irrational hope, he was starting to sense a terrible inevitability.
Every few moments he heard the beep-beep-bong of a monitor alarm. He breathed in the smells of sterilizing chemicals, the occasional tang of cologne, and a faint background smell of warm electrical equipment.
She was in the bed, bandaged and wired, endotracheal and nasogastric tubes in her mouth and nostrils. She had a probe in her skull to measure her intracranial pressure, another on one finger, and a forest of IV lines and drains from bags suspended from drip-stands running into her crinkly arms and abdomen. Eyes shut, she lay motionless, surrounded by racks of monitoring and life-support apparatus. Two computer display screens were mounted to her right, and there was a laptop on the trolley at the end of the bed with all her notes and readings on it.
‘Aileen, I’m here with you. It’s Gavin. I’m here.’
Then he saw her lips moving, although he could not hear her voice. He leaned down, close to her lips, but still could hear no sound. He looked back at her.
‘What did they take?’ she mouthed.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what they took yet, but none of that matters. Only you matter.’
Again she mouthed the words. ‘Did they take the watch? It was all we had of him. Remember the message that boy gave you. Watch the numbers?’